Chris Doughty is an associate professor of ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, US. He is leading the project Effects of Reintroduction of Large Animal Species on the Earth’s Adaptation to Climate Change.
Doughty earned a BA in honors environmental science from the University of California, Berkeley, US, and completed an MS (2005) and PhD (2008) in Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, US, followed by a research lectureship at Oxford University, UK. Doughty is the lead author of publications in prestigious journals like Nature, PNAS and Nature Eco/Evo. He has been the lead PI on several NASA grants, exploring topics such as understanding heat stress in tropical plants, investigating how forest elephants impact forest structure, improving a global ecosystem model to predict the future of all life on Earth, and even finding multicellular life on exoplanets.
Research Focus
Research in Doughty’s lab focuses on how climate change will impact tropical forests and how large animal extinctions could impact ecosystem function. Specifically, his lab has shown that these extinctions have affected the planet’s fertility, ecosystem structure, climate, biodiversity and disease dynamics. This knowledge is used to inform conservation decisions and to predict the impacts of future animal reintroductions with a focus on finding natural climate change solutions.